I’ve been writing up research summaries and proposals and just penned this inelegant but hopefully useful statement on what I perceive as the value of user testing.
We’re working with a very small sample size and are not claiming that these are statistically significant results. Rather, the usability sessions are thoughtful, detailed conversations about our product with people who are looking at new features with fresh eyes; and if they’ve used the product before, they’re sharing real-life perspectives on how they experience it.
At Safari Books Online we have started a monthly Usability Friday — and you should, too!
The idea came from Steve Krug who outlined this model of running usability evaluations at last October’s Voices that Matter conference. He proposed that usability evaluation should be: regularly scheduled, attended in person rather than via webcast, and relatively fun and easy to manage. By making the process lightweight and inclusive (rather than formal and ponderous and overly documented) the evaluations are likely to be continued as part of a standard business process, rather than as a once-a-year hullabaloo. Specifically, he recommended having a morning of usability sessions (mostly in the form of one-on-one task analysis) followed by a team lunch to review interesting takeaways and next steps.
Educational technology of the future – unfortunately, this is pretty close to where we are with most online learning tools in 2008. (From boingboing.com)
Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teacher of much paper work in the classroom.
At the conclusion of one of today’s sessions, an audience member asked the panel about the danger of releasing textbooks into academic environments without DRM. Ben Vershbow turned the question around. He responded that the entire notion of textbooks should be rethought, and that textbooks should be thought of as extensions of the classroom learning environment rather than as products — and as such, educational publishers should think of providing text books as a service rather than a product.
